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If anything I think the potential harm occurring with psychiatric drug use has been underplayed rather than overplayed. This is to say that I have every reason to believe psychiatric drugs are much more dangerous and damaging than they are credited with being. Desperate people though are often more apt to listen to their desperation than they are to listen to the more cautious voice of reason and health.

Education is key when it comes to changing this situation. First people must be educated about the ills that come of taking neuroleptic and other psychiatric drugs. They need to know the conditions caused by the extended use of psychiatric drugs, and they need to be aware of how it raises the mortality rate dramatically. They must come to see that true recovery is attained through tapering off psychiatric drugs rather than dependently over relying upon them, and that over relying upon such chemicals is worse than risky, in actual fact it is rank folly.

Living in an area where these connections are not being made makes public education that much more important. When the “trade off” for a modicum of emotional stability is a matter of 25 and more lost years of life, that’s not a fair trade in the slightest. Nobody needs to sacrifice a third of their lifetime to “medication maintenance”, and more when you consider the loss in terms of quality of life. What people do need to know is that their chances for making a complete recovery are much better if they are never exposed to psychiatric drugs in the first place. When they do make this connection, the need for alternatives to psychiatric drug treatment becomes apparent.

People who have been enduring the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs for years, under the misguided opinion that they can’t function without them, should become better informed. There should also be support groups to help people who wish to get off psychiatric drugs to do so. People need to know just what the dangers are of remaining on psychiatric drugs as well. The longer a person takes a psychiatric drug, the more likely it becomes that that person will suffer permanent physical damage. Outside chemicals are just not the best way to maintain emotional stability. Nature, the evolved nature one was born with, works much better.

Psychiatric drug dependence and “mental illness” are practically interchangeable terms now. What psychiatric drugs can’t provide is “mental health”. People who don’t use such chemicals are said to be “mentally healthy”, and one can’t be said to be “mentally healthy” so long as one uses a psychiatric drug. People who take psychiatric drugs, in so doing, often put their physical health at risk. There are other and better ways to deal with the stress and pressure that comes of modern living, and the idea is to help people deal with the stress and pressure in ways other than that of masking such with the effects of a thought distorting, brain disabling, psychiatric drug.

If chronicity in “mental illness” is actually the result of psychiatric drug dependence, as some of us maintain, then the way to restore people to capacity is through tapering them off chemicals. Psychiatry, blind to the excess embodied in its own practice, has disastrously failed to recover a large portion of people under its influence to functionality. We can do much about this shortcoming by educating people about psychiatric drugs, and by providing them with safe alternatives to treatments employing harmful psychiatric drugs. It is crucial that we do so before psychiatry, in combinations with rapacious drug companies, wreaks even more havoc on the world than it has done thus far.

Lester Cook, with bullhorn, and Celia Brown, director of MindFreedom International, in front of the Jacob K. Jarvits Convention Center in New York City.

Jim Gottstein, director of the Center for Psychiatric Rights, Gary Null, author and radio show host, and Harry Bentivegna Lichtenstein at the demonstration.

Vera H. Sherav, founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, speaks at the protest.

Laura Delano, psychiatric survivor and Mad In America blogger, speaks at the protest.

The APA, Big Pharma, and the Feds Get Cozy

The theme of the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association this year is Changing the Practice and Perception of Psychiatry. In other words, whitewash, and therefore, actor Alan Alda, former Senator Patrick Kennedy, Vice President Joseph Biden, and actor Joey “Pants” Pantoliano are present at the event. This is PR, baby, and in a big way, too. The drug companies are also well represented. There is, in fact, a Disclosure Index in the downloadable program that shows the financial relationships between the speakers and Big Pharma. Most of the speakers have such ties.

As for Change in Practice, the APA began in Philadelphia in 1844 as the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, there were 13 members back then. Fast forward, there are 36,000 some members now. I was reading just the other day how someone didn’t think there were enough pediatric psychiatrists in the USA. The slant of this article then was that we need more child psychiatrists labeling and drugging more children, a situation sure to result in more maimed, wounded, and in some cases, dead children.

The fact that Vice President Joe Biden has been invited to give a lecture tomorrow should come as a surprise to no one. One of President Barrack Obama’s most insistent reelection campaign promises involved criminalizing mental patients. Why else would their names be put on a criminal background checklist while their second amendment constitutional rights were routinely violated? Vice President Biden was chosen to chair a task force making scapegoats of people in the mental health system for the violence of a very few individuals.

Out of this task force, and other committee meetings, it has been proposed that school workers be trained as mental health cops. These mental health cops would target children for labeling and drugging, and they would bust them for “mental illness”. The idea is that if we catch them early enough, they won’t slip through the cracks in the system, and grow up to become multiple murderers. I have more of a worry, on the other hand, that they may be murdered instead, and by psychiatry.

I think we must be in the second century of the brain now, researchers are so intent on finding a biological basis for so called “mental illness”. They’ve got it all figured out. “Mental illness” is physical illness, black is white, war is peace, hate is love, and death is life. If there’s a third century of the brain, I’d wager they won’t find any biological basis for so called “mental illness” then either. What we will get out of the matter is more dead babies, more dead adults, and more dead senior citizens.

One cannot fail to see irony in the fact that the same government that would contain its mental patients through violence, attributes violence to mental patients. Labeling a person “mentally ill” sanctions libel, abduction, assault, torture, imprisonment, neglect, brainwashing, poisoning and even murder of that person, all in the name of mental health. Psychiatry is voodoo science. In that profession, you’ve got phony doctors, using phony medicine (real poison), on phony patients, to treat phony diseases, with devastating results.

Answer: Zombies!

The issue is mental illness, and it’s an abstraction rather than a reality. Physical diseases are real. Mental diseases are in the head, just like leprechauns and dragons. The idea presented by the mental health movement is that we need to take it out of the shadows, that is, talk about it, as if talking about it were more healing than silence. Actually, this talking is a matter of positioning that tin cup for a government handout. When it comes to any funds drummed up in this fashion, maybe we should call it dragon protection money.

The mental health movement is all about mental illness. As this is the case, I think it would be better to change the spelling of mental health from mental health to mental hellth. You can’t talk about mental illness, in excess, without selling it. The Center for Disease Control has already got it, mental illness, spreading to epidemic proportions. Why? People want money so they can treat mental illness. Treating mental illness is what we call mental hellth.

Alright, first premise of mental hellth: Mental illness is real illness. We’ve got an abstraction here, sure, and it’s a real abstraction. The mental hellth movement wants this abstraction to have a physical presence, and so they are calling it physical. In fact, they wouldn’t have it be an abstraction at all, they’d have it be a medical condition. This leads directly to The Thousand Diseases project, or the DSM; in other words, the labeling of ordinary behaviors as diseased because it puts bread and butter on the plates of mental hellth professionals.

Second premise of mental hellth: People possessed by mental diseases are not able nor capable of mature actions. They are beyond, so-to-speak, the practice of self-control. These people possessed of the mental illness bug have thus been rendered, by this bug, incapable of making mature decisions and, therefore, their position as free moral agents is considered forfeit. Other people, or the state, must make their decisions for them. This forfeiture means essentially that such people are not to be covered by the bill of rights to the US constitution.

If wisdom were health then this sort of misperception would transform folly into illness. There is no need to correct fools when if you can hospitalize/imprison them, is there? The big issue is whether this implied wisdom doesn’t actually represent the compounding of folly with further folly. The problem we’ve got here is that wise people can be sick, just like the mentally hellthy, and foolish people can be healthy, just like the mentally sick.

Selling mental hellth is not, make no mistake about it, selling health. Selling mental hellth is selling mental illness. As most mental hellth treatment involves harming the patient, it is often thought, falsely, that there is a relationship between mental illness and physical disease. There isn’t. The relationship is between mental hellth treatment and physical injury because that is what mental hellth treatment actually is, physical injury.

Of course, there is no way mental hellth could sell injury as a curative agent without a sleight of hand, without deception. This deception involves implying that the injury was actually caused by the impugned disease, and not by it’s treatment. Mental hellth is big business. The more “sickness” perceived, the more injury inflicted,, the more severe the perception of the typical cases, the more job security, and the more the industry is a growth industry.

Injury as a growth industry presents us with a pretty perplexing conundrum. Generally messes are things we’d want cleaned up rather than exacerbated. This is not true where injury is thought to produce mental hellth. The mental hellth the injury produces is coupled and confused with mental illness. Getting people out of the treatment program , out of the system, is not the major concern of mental hellth professionals. Providing for families and lifestyles at the expense of mental patients, that is the major concern of mental hellth professionals.

A local mental health, oops, wrong word. A local “mental illness” system advocacy group, the Mental Health Coalition of North Central Florida, is going to have their own little NAMIfied shindig. They are holding this event for what they call “Mental Illness Awareness Day”. My immediate response on hearing the announcement is found in the following question. Wouldn’t it be better to hold a “Mental Illness Unawareness Day”? When it comes to awareness, “mental illness” awareness is just not the kind of awareness I find particularly helpful. I kind of have this feeling, you know, screwed up enlightenment isn’t really enlightenment.

This group. the MHCNCF, has even given the event a name. It’s called Gainesville Day of Understanding For Mental Illness Recovery. Again, I’ve got an issue with the name. Why the heck would anybody want to recover a “mental illness”? And if this or that person had a “mental illness”, and managed to lose it, would that really be such a bad thing? I suppose some people are really sentimental about their problems, but those problems are probably not such good things to hang onto. They’re not answers anyway. What sort of understanding should anybody have then of this “mental illness” a person has recovered? Now tell me that isn’t a bad choice of words.

Another possibility would be to throw a Mental Health or Mental Wellness Awareness Day shindig, and to talk about understanding the recovery of complete mental well being, but I imagine the thought is beyond the capacity of this little group of mostly scoundrels to comprehend. Where is this little shindig going to be? In a community senior recreation center? Already I’m seeing a few young heads, look both ways, and then walk off in the opposite direction. I don’t know. Yes, yes, old age and feeble minds might go together, but let’s not cut to the hearse chase if we can help from doing so. I don’t want to sound too critical, but a senior recreation center sounds less neutral to me than another location that might be less apt to scare off the few ingenues among them.

This leads me to the agenda for this event. #1. Proclamation of Mental Illness Awareness Week. Yikes! Didn’t I just deal with this subject, and they want a week of it. Again, I would suggest a “Mental Illness” Unawareness Week. It makes more sense to me; I’d think it should make more sense to them, too. #2. Path of Understanding. Path of Understanding “mental illness” recovery I presume. Geez, just think…There are other paths, and some of them are even challenging. #3. Celebrity Walk of Fame. Uh, because celebrities make “mental illness” cool I imagine. #4. Resource Station. Yep, I believe that’s a sign taped over the word “police”. #5. Candle lighting service. I know, this is going to be about people believed to be destroyed by “mental illness”, and not about people believed destroyed by the mental health system. The horses are calm so long as they have their blinders on. #6. Moment of silence. Any longer and the gig would be up. Everybody would know this little event is a farce.

I get it. Really. Take your drugs, and enjoy the farce without ever attaining consciousness that it is a farce. Do so, as well as you can, anyway, despite the “side effects” from the drugs you are on. Consciousness, after all, is what people given diagnostic labels are presumed to be lacking in. If you are dosed sufficiently, then you shouldn’t be able to attain consciousness anyway. Perhaps your understanding will be limited to understanding “mental illness” recovery. The fact that some people really do recover from the upsets of a crisis period, and go on to live full and eventful lives, is not the kind of message these folks want to give. This event isn’t really about living an independent self-reliant and emotionally satisfying life anyway. It’s about holding out that little tin cup, and crying, “Nickels for your pity.” They’re hoping, beyond hope, that maybe the government is listening.

If I was in government, I could do better than support people in their “mental illnesses”. For one thing, I could get further more economically if I were supporting people in their “mental well-nesses”. Treatment can be darned expensive, and a burden on the entire nation. An expanding “mental illness” system, what these people are after, means an even bigger expense and an even bigger burden. Accountability, responsibility, for people who work in mental health services should entail helping people get out of the system entirely rather than encouraging them to accept the dependency role of what amounts to a ward of the state. The system here has a whole lot of rethinking to do before it gets back on track. All I can do is chuckle my amusement as I’m certain that that rethinking, in the long run, is inevitable. Let me tell you, it certainly represents an improvement over the current stupidity.

For shyster shrinks, these must be glorious days indeed. Lying drug company lacky, Charles Nemeroff, after getting booted off Emory University campus for lying about the extent of funds he received from prescription drug cartels, gets hired by the University of Miami, and now is being honored (for his dishonor?) in Great Britain. Conflict of interest, literally corruption, has never had it so good before.

The headline in The Independent, Honoured in Britain, the US psychiatrist who took $1.2m from drug companies, doesn’t quite tell the whole story. It wasn’t that he took well over a million dollars from drug companies. There is a law in the USA requiring US doctors in academia to reveal the amount of money they received from prescription drug companies, and scofflaw Dr. Charles Nemeroff lied about this matter to the tune of 1 million smackers and 2 hundred k.

The good news is that, at least, this decision has generated controversy, and there are people in England who challenge it.

The decision by the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College, in central London, Europe’s largest psychiatric research organization, to invite Professor Charles Nemeroff, an expert in the treatment of depression, has split the psychiatric profession and been attacked by members of the institute itself. Professor Nemeroff, a leading authority on the biological causes of mental illness, is one of the highest profile doctors to have been exposed for concealing large payments from pharmaceutical companies.

His credentials…

He was forced to resign his post at Emory University, Atlanta, in 2008 after an investigation revealed that he had failed to report more than $1.2m of payments from GlaxoSmithKline, despite having signed an undertaking to limit payments to $10,000 a year.

This firing resulted in a subsequent appointment to the University of Miami and a research grant on top of it. What’s it to the University of Miami so long as drug companies are being sued and not institutions of higher education? The crook they took is now being honored as a conquering hero.

In what other field would lawbreaking be considered an advantageous career move? Drug companies are receiving the highest civil suit penalties in history for off-label prescription practices and here, one their pigeons, is being honored for his deceit.

Not everybody is happy with this decision. Some people object to this advancement of the criminal element.

Now a group of UK psychiatrists have written to the Institute of Psychiatry protesting against its decision to invite Professor Nemeroff to give the “inaugural annual lecture for the new Centre for Affective Disorders”, which is due to take place at the institute next Monday.

Knuckle rapping is one thing, promotions, that’s another. This leaves the question open as to which psychiatrist will be the next to turn criminal activities into a strategic career move.

Much newsprint has been wasted recently on the split between the APA (American Psychiatric Association) and the NIMH over the revision of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that is going to be called the DSM-5. In my view, letting the 100,000 manuals bloom is not going to be any better of a solution than letting the 100,000 diagnoses bloom in the long run. If we are going to treat every patient as an individual, for the sake of the individuality of his or her condition (and genetic makeup), that’s going to make for a whole lot of variation in disorder (and/or order) expression.

The New York Times covers the story, regarding the NIMH APA divide, in a story with the heading, Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out Of Touch With Science, Experts Say. Of course, it always depends on which experts you ask. The experts the mass media is still slow to consult, and the New York Times is no exception in this regard, are those experts with lived experience on the receiving end of mental health treatment.

While typically critics of the DSM have tackled the subject from one side of the political psychiatric spectrum, here comes mob boss Thomas Insel, godfather of the NIMH, attacking from the other. In the first instance, you have people who object to the biology in biological psychiatric theory, (Theory, now there’s as important a word as any.) in the second, you have a group that doesn’t think the APA is biologically grounded enough.

The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

Precision seems to be a big part of the problem. In psychiatric diagnosis, theoretical speculations aside, there are no precision tools.

The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”

Or, a possibility not considered here, we’ve got five misdiagnoses floating around for which there was no underlying condition in the first place.

Solution. The NIMH is developing it’s own manual, Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC.

About two years ago, to spur a move in that direction, Dr. Insel started a federal project called Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC, which he highlighted in a blog post last week. Dr. Insel said in the blog that the National Institute of Mental Health would be “reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories” because “patients with mental disorders deserve better.” His commentary has created ripples throughout the mental health community.

Consider, ripples sent throughout the mental health community, ripple throughout the “mental illness” community (i.e. the mental health ghetto). Now whether “patients with mental disorders” are going to get “better” treatment thereby is a big leap. Too big a leap in fact to make. So sorry, my poor victims of standard psychiatric malpractice!

Whatever you call it, my guess is that this switch still represents a way of billing insurance companies, the most important role for patient consumers a psychiatrist assumes. Of course, given that this paradigm change is all about biological explanations, I expect the treatment the insurance companies will be paying for is a chemical fix. Given this situation, the extent to which pharmaceuticals damage patients is still the great unasked question biological psychiatrists do their best to avoid asking.